raghu wrote: > Riddle me this: if it is fundamentally impossible to have a functioning [Obamacare] website, how come the state exchanges are working so much better: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/25/opinion/krugman-california-here-we-come.html <
Yes, we all believe Paul Krugman's opinion pieces accurately reflect reality. Krugman praises California while gliding over states like Oregon. Still, you might consider more than a pundit's article. --- Maybe Covered California isn't such a standout after all San Francisco Business Times, Dec 6, 2013 ... It's still not clear how many of the reported 79,891 folks who'd signed up for coverage as of Nov. 19 have successfully enrolled in a health plan. ... Insurance brokers say 25,000 paper applications remain in limbo. ... Said an angry East Bay broker, "We were forced to submit paper applications because the website wasn't working properly..." ... Meanwhile, more than 1 million Californians are losing current individual and family coverage... [Many of them will need to use the portal; these are in addition to the 5 million uninsured in the state.] ... http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2013/12/delays-stymie-covered-california-signups.html --- * California has more than 5 million people eligible to buy at the Covered California portal. In fact, to get the subsidy, you must use the CC portal. * As of Nov. 19, 80,000 have signed up. CC stopped issuing the number of signups after that date, and problems loom for an unknown portion of those who have signed up but have not completed enrollment with their chosen insurer. * Some 25,000 people have filed paper applications, largely because they could not get it done on the CC portal. In sum, less than two percent have signed, and among them the ratio of success trying to sign up is roughly 75%. Doesn't sound so great. Whether the California portal, unlike the federal portal, quotes premiums before computing a verfied subsidy for you, I do not know. In any case, California does not show that federal Obamacare has a routine case of mismanaged IT development. Advocates of Medicare for All have no reason to wish for the administrative failure of Obamacare. Let it work perfectly -- at its core, Obamacare remains an attack on the health care obtained by workers, retirees, and the poor. The disastrous rollout and similar problems that loom show that we did not appreciate the administrative contradictions of satisfying the insurance, health provider, and pharmaceutical corporations while pretending to be a government for the people. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
